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Never too old to find a match!

Posted on 11/19/08

When I signed up with the DSR a year ago, I did it more with the hopes of finding information about my donor, than with any thoughts of actually finding a sibling. After all, I'd be conceived in the late sixties, well before the existence of sperm banks with registered donors. At that time everything was very secretive, with absolutely no information given to the parents. When I got to the DSR, I was the first person to create a listing under my mom's doctor's name, from New York City. About eight months later, a woman emailed me to say that her mother had used the same doctor as mine, just two years later. We figured we could band together to find out as much info as we could about how the doctor (now long deceased) had gone about finding donors. After a few months of research, we were able to piece together that the pool of donors he used was actually very small. It honestly hadn't occurred to us before that we could be siblings, but once we learned about the small donor pool, we figured why not give it a shot. So we found the most reliable and thorough testing facility, and did a half-sibling DNA test. Lo and behold, it came back with 99.7% certainty that we were sisters! So for all the older donor offspring out there who have only fragments of the story of their conception, don't give up hope. At this point finding the donor (if he's still alive) would be great, but finding a sister and a whole extended family is so much more than we could have hoped for. Thank you DSR!!!!

UPDATE (JAN 2010): We found another sister!!!! Her mom had registered here, and we got to know her first, and then her daughter. A DNA test confirmed it just this week!

FURTHER UPDATE! (FEB 2012): Two brothers!! One we found through 23andme.com, a DNA website. We've found a six year gap between us, which means that the donor would have been donating fresh sperm (not frozen yet) for six years! Whoever he is, he had a lot of stamina! ;o)

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